180,000 flee as nuclear-plant crisis intensifies in quake-ravaged Japan

Associated Press

KORIYAMA, Japan

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary says a hydrogen explosion occurred today at Unit 3 of Japan’s stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The blast was similar to an earlier one at a different unit of the facility.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. says three workers have been injured and seven are missing.

Yukio Edano says people within a 12-mile radius were ordered inside after the blast. AP journalists felt the explosion 30 miles away.

Edano says the reactor’s inner-containment vessel holding nuclear rods is intact, allaying some fears of the risk to the environment and public.

The No. 3 Unit reactor had been under emergency watch for a possible explosion as pressure built up there after a hydrogen blast Saturday in the facility’s Unit 1.

More than 180,000 people have evacuated the area.

Also today, soldiers and officials along a stretch of Japan’s northeastern coast warned residents that the area could be hit by another tsunami and ordered them to higher ground. But the Meteorological Agency said there was no risk of another deadly wave.

Four nuclear plants in northeastern Japan have reported damage.

Operators have lost the ability to cool three reactors at Dai-ichi and three more at another nearby complex using usual procedures, after the quake knocked out power and the tsunami- swamped backup generators.

Operators have been dumping seawater into units 1 and 3 in a last-ditch measure to cool the reactors.

They were getting water into the other four reactors with cooling problems without resorting to corrosive sea water, which likely makes the reactors unusable.

Edano’s statements did little to ease public worries.

“First I was worried about the quake,” said Kenji Koshiba, a construction worker who lives near the plant. “Now I’m worried about radiation.” He spoke at an emergency center in Koriyama, about 40 miles from the most troubled reactors and 125 miles north of Tokyo.

A higher than usual level of radiation was detected at the Dai-ichi plant today, after levels rose and dropped in previous days. Naoki Kumagai, an official at Japan’s nuclear safety agency, told the Associated Press that a person at the monitoring site for an hour would get as much radiation as a plant worker typically gets in six months, but added that the levels would be much higher of one of the reactors were on the verge of a meltdown.

The radiation was detected on the grounds, and Unit 1 was the closest reactor, but it was unclear whether that was where the radiation came from, said agency official Yoshihiro Sugiyama.

At the makeshift center set up in a gym, a steady flow of people — mostly the elderly, schoolchildren and families with babies — were met by officials wearing helmets, surgical masks and goggles.

About 1,500 people had been scanned for radiation exposure, officials said.

Up to 160 people, including 60 elderly patients and medical staff who had been waiting for evacuation in the nearby town of Futabe, and 100 others evacuating by bus, might have been exposed to radiation, said Ryo Miyake, a spokesman from Japan’s nuclear agency. It was unclear whether any cases of exposure had reached dangerous levels.

Edano said none of the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors was near the point of complete meltdown, and he was confident of escaping the worst scenarios.

Officials, though, have declared states of emergency at the six reactors where cooling systems were down — three at Dai-ichi and three at the nearby Fukushima Daini complex. The U.N. nuclear agency said a state of emergency was also declared Sunday at another complex, the Onagawa power plant, after higher-than-permitted levels of radiation were measured there. It said Japan informed it that all three reactors there were under control.

Japan’s nuclear crisis was triggered by twin disasters Friday, when an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, the most powerful in the country’s recorded history, was followed by a tsunami that savaged its northeastern coast with breathtaking speed and power.

Nearly 1,600 people were confirmed dead and hundreds more were missing, according to officials, but police in one of the worst-hit areas estimated the toll there alone was more than 10,000.

All of the reactors in the region shut down automatically when the earthquake hit. But with backup power supplies also failing, shutting down the reactors is just the beginning of the problem, scientists said.

“You need to get rid of the heat,” said Friedrich Steinhaeusler, a professor of physics and biophysics at Salzburg University and an adviser to the Austrian government on nuclear issues. “You are basically putting the lid down on a pot that is boiling.”

“They have a window of opportunity where they can do a lot,” he said, such as using sea water as an emergency coolant.

But if the heat is not brought down, the cascading problems can eventually be impossible to control. “This isn’t something that will happen in a few hours. It’s days.”

Japan has a total of 55 reactors spread across 17 complexes nationwide.